2. The Avian Challenge of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana; or, The Pigeon Effect

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Preface vii
4. Introduction. Parrots and Starlings 1
5. 1. “O Friends, There Are No Friends”: The Aesthetics of Avian Sympathy in Defoe and Sterne 23
6. 2. The Avian Challenge of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana; or, The Pigeon Effect 46
7. 3. Smart’s Professors: Birdsong and Rhetorical Agency in Jubilate Agno 68
8. 4. A Volatile Unity: Coleridge, Starling Murmurations, and Romantic Form 97
9. 5. Words Are for the Birds: “Non- reasoning Creatures Capable of Speech” in the Writings of Schreber and Poe 120
10. 6. Splitting the Lyric Lark; or, Dickinson’s Music Box 143
11. 7. The Starling’s Whistle: Autophilology and the Order of Osip Mandel’shtam’s Birds 163
12. 8. Colonial and Postcolonial Birds of Game, Games of Bird 181
13. 9. Of Mimicry, Birds, and Words: The Technology of Starling Song in European, American, and Indonesian Poetry 213
14. 10. Yogini and Mynah Bird: On the Poetics and Politics of Transspecies Meditation 238
15. Afterword. A Starling Manifesto for Mocking Bird Technologies 253
16. Coda. Tornada, in Starling Form 269
17. List of Contributors 279
18. Index 283